The Wolf in the Fable
by Kyilliki
Summary: This will not be a pretty love affair, rose-glossed and ornamental. Caius x Athenodora
1. Chapter 1

**TITLE:** The Wolf in the Fable

**PRIMARY PAIRING:** Caius/ Athenodora

**RATING:** T

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** You may consider this a re-write of 'Like Winter', or 'A Thousand Stairs' through a different set of eyes, or a combination of the two. I'm sticking to chapters approximately 700 words in length because it has ensured prompt updating in the past.

The story title is translated from the Latin expression, 'lupus in fabula', which is a quirky little turn of phrase that means something akin to, "speak of the devil and he will appear".

* * *

Athenodora is a surprise.

Caius brings her to Velathri, a bundle of sleet-stained cloak and lunar pallor, with neither announcement nor precedent. Cradled in cold arms, she is a wound-winged sparrow plucked from the dirt and shielded by a child's cupped palms. Nonetheless, sentimentality's shroud does not prevent Aro from spotting the blotted blue wreathing her mouth where a hand, immortal and incautious, has been splayed to keep her knotted in nothingness deeper than slumber.

He sighs. The past decades have been far too quiet. Trust Caius to disrupt that.

"You've brought a meal with you, I see," he muses aloud, knowing the pronouncement to be more prudent than accusing his brother of awkward affection towards a shivering, still-breathing creature.

Caius says nothing, and Aro sees Sulpicia's reprise, another girl who holds a half-god's heart.

"May I?" he asks, shale fingers with shorn nails hovering a feather's edge over the violet snarls of her veins. Perhaps her mind is extraordinary in its facets, a cipher and a key, though she seems only a pale, pretty thing.

"Ask her when she wakes," his wintry brother hisses, slipping a protective palm between her silvered skin and Aro's. The response is half-rational, for the minds of mortals cannot reveal half as much as those of the once-dead.

"I trust that you have considered her family." The slate-haired immortal turns pedantic now.

"They will not seek their child so far from their city," he says, and it is then that Aro notices his brother's vivid eyes, the peppered crimson that lingers upon a knuckle and pools in the hollows of his throat.

"How many remain to search for her, do if they choose to do so?" he wonders.

Caius grins, a hunter's sickle smile. "A few," he hazards, but Aro doubts the estimate. His left hand does not embrace the notion of survivors.

"Your aversion to half-measures is admirable as always, little brother," he laughs, knuckles gleefully entwined. There is such delicious dichotomy in Caius' conduct, far too amusing to be overlooked. "You will, of course, turn our little guest?"

"Stop me if I—" Caius stumbles, seeking the words to frame the girl's death in kinder terms. Once more, he reveals fissures in his facade of ice, and wine-rich triumph touches Aro's tongue.

"Certainly."

[-]

In the marshlight of the windowless room where mortals meet eternity, Athenodora is colourless, rivalling the glacial grace of the monster that kneels at her side and holds her wrist, seeking the vessels there.

Her skin splits with a taut tear beneath his teeth, once more and again, until she is a mewling, arching girl on fire, her throat and arms, ribs and hipbones, one thrashing ankle, tattooed with oozing scarlet.

Aro brushes Caius' hand then, curious. Sentiment of any sort is so scarce from his wolf-wary brother that he is impatient to grasp at its traces, though they may be reduced to shambles and shreds.

What a literal creature Caius is. His mind is no labyrinth, but an open moor of memories and dancing desire, wound in stripped ribbons around Athenodora. Tarnished intentions, untouched by the shimmering play of light upon snow that characterizes Marcus' lovelorn musings, curl around the girl like ink in water, reforming her into something of his own deviant devising.

This will not be a pretty love affair, rose-glossed and ornamental, Aro predicts with a cat's clever grin.

Before his fingers fumble, permitting Caius the half-serenity of his thoughts, Aro catches a cobweb of gentleness, incongruous in reacherous terrain. His brother cares sufficiently, it seems, to grant the girl immortality, a pretence of equal footing that is infrequently extended to opponents and victims alike.

Aro steps away then, and observes Caius commit a murder that, from the violent view of a thousand years, is exquisitely gentle.

* * *

**(yet another) AUTHOR'S NOTE:** First chapters are never the most compelling. Stick around for the second, though :)


	2. Chapter 2

Athenodora's screams carry for far too long.

Somehow, Caius has carried supposition of a swift metamorphosis. She is such a willowy thing, cobbled out of cobwebs and bones, her rabbit-heart racing between rounded ribs; it cannot conceivably take days for her breath to cease.

He takes to her haunting her side, for no reason he can name. There is something delicate in this demise, moments of grotesque prettiness as her nails and fingertips, lips and cheeks fade from rose to the stinging shade of a bruise, but beauty has never held him in its thrall before. Occasionally, he takes her hand into his, toying with it as a child would. Affection is absent from the slither of silken skin or perhaps concealed well, but curiosity remains.

"You are becoming Aro, I see," Didyme laughs, a whimsical whirl of dark curls and tapping, tapering fingers at his shoulder.

"You couldn't stay away, apparently," Caius notes, caught between impatience and indulgence.

"Of course not. Now let me meet my future sister."

"Oh, she is pretty!" she chirps, brushing slim palms over Athenodora's sweat-matted hair. "You look similar," she decides, as though sunless skin and brows slashed in scowling slopes are requisite amongst lovers.

Caius allows her to go on, shimmering and lucent, because that is far simpler than turning the soliloquy into dialogue and revealing just how little he knows about the conversation's subject, whose snarled shrieks are grim punctuation.

[-]

Athenodora opens ember-eyes to the winter light of midnight.

The moonlight detaches itself from its corner and crouches beside her. For a moment, she wonders if the pain's receding tide has taken her mind with it, before catching the angles and edges of a man with burgundy irises.

"It will end soon," he says, and she grasps the threadbare corners of comfort in his tone, as though he is unaccustomed to softness. There is no reply to be made, but he remains her shadow regardless, still as sandstone.

The inferno tightens, loops itself into a single, unyielding ember which sits in her throat, raising thirsty blisters upon scarless flesh, but she can feel her limbs once more.

In a fraction of an hour, she sits, adjusting meagre cloth around a willowy frame, and examines the creature beside her through indelicately lowered lashes.

He is excruciatingly, exquisitely beautiful, rendered in sharp strokes and bleached bone. Unbidden, Athenodora's fingers curl like petals, as though they wish to web themselves over his skin in a play of caresses sweeping as water. She is certain her gaze has turned devouring, tinted scarlet with want, and wonders why he wears a mirror of her expression.

Her next thought is frozen and characteristically sharp: there is something not quite right about her companion.

He is hungry, she decides after fleeting observation, ravenous as a beast in winter and just as mad. If his tunic shifted, she fancies that she will see starved ribs and claws where nails ought to be, a lycanthrope of legends.

It is an idle idea, but Athenodora has always been an inventive girl.

"My name is Caius," he says, reined and cautious.

A Roman who introduces himself with no mention of his hallowed forefathers is a modest rarity, Athenodora muses, but an uncomfortable one.

"Athenodora," she replies, her voice chapped to her own ears. The desire to drink and tear rises with every instant, swallowing her thousand questions whole.

"I know," he admits, as the imbalance between them slips further in his favour. "How thirsty are you?"

Extremely," she says, not questioning his insight.

"Come with me." He offers her a hand, to pull her onto bare feet. It is an odd gesture, the sort of camaraderie only children share, but she accepts. In an ugly instant, she is certain that she could crush his fingers to powder and ash with a leisurely stroke, and half-gasps at the notion's brutal origin.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** A note on Roman names, for the curious: In ancient Italy, using only one's first name was extremely unusual, and reserved for family and close friends. Thus, Athenodora would find it odd to meet people who only introduced themselves as Caius (or Marcus, or Sulpicia).

An enormous thank-you to everyone who reviewed and favourited the previous chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

When the screams of mortals have settled, leaving stagnant calm in their wake, Athenodora uncurls herself from a hunter's crouch, her mouth painted in shattered shades of scarlet. She makes no attempt to recoil, instead raising fingers like wings and tangling them in the dawn, an artist with a fractured medium. Somewhere in the hollows and hallways of her mind, roiling horror reigns, but that will be addressed in solitude, far from an eager audience.

From his guarded position in the swimming darkness of an ancient arch, Caius watches. He is accustomed to shocked sensibilities, reluctance to play the role of a murderous, blood-mad deity that accompanies metamorphosis. Perhaps surprise shows itself on marble features, for Athenodora's expression turns sharp.

"Were you expecting tortured morality?" she demands, defiant and falcon-eyed.

"Forgive me." There is an almost-smile curving the corner of his mouth, bringing laughing youth with it. Pride polishes the gesture to quicksilver, and Athenodora wonders why her companion delights in antagonism, or perhaps the moments when she is most monstrous. "I did not intend to underestimate you."

"What are you?" She knows herself to be his shadow, a raw-edged, toddling thing, but the minutiae of her condition are a mystery.

"Dead," Caius says, certain that she will note the stillness between her ribs with time. "Immortal," he adds, explaining blood bartered for eternity.

"Why am I like you?" she presses, terribly, delicately unafraid, and he admits himself impressed. Reckless, half-thoughtless audacity compels his admiration more than even her light-spun loveliness.

"I made it so," he says, and leaves sentiment cobwebbed and caught in silence.

Her lips mould around the lilting lines of a question, but she allows quiet to claim enquiry's place. Athenodora has seen his gaze pool upon her skin, bright with reverence and heavy as wax with want; there can be no mistaking such apparent intent, though he haltingly attempts to conceal it.

"I did not ask for this," she says instead, lofty and perfectly Grecian in her indignity.

"Would you prefer to live your allotted half-century before dying in the usual agony?" he asks, jagged as beaten copper and clever enough to draw her into the fray. Wrath, he has found, is a far better thing than desolation's salt-sown wasteland.

"Yes," she says.

"You are lying."

"And you are presuming that I want to be like you and with you until history's ending," she retorts without pause, needled by the apparent absurdity of his conviction.

He steps away from debate into the sticky uncertainty of sincere speech.

"I offer you anything you could desire," he says, and half-longs for Aro's gift. Athenodora, he recalls, was a watchful, witty girl while she lived, lacking Sulpicia's cat-eyed wiliness. Power's mantle will not tempt her to his side then, and he is not foolish enough to attempt Marcus' method of vowing unending devotion to near-strangers.

"I wish to leave."

"Predictably," Caius notes, mostly to himself and not without amusement. "That you cannot do. Our laws forbid a newborn from departing alone. The chaos you will engender can only terrify the humans, and our kind must remain in the shadows.

"Would you be the one enforcing the law?"she asks, a knowing brow bowed.

He nods, observing that accurate intuition pleases her.

"Then—what is there for me to do?"

The bite of iron is absent from her words, and she stands lost, a rootless wraith with ruby eyes and clot-matted hair; Caius cannot bear being the cause of the ebbing embers in her eyes. Of its own volition, his hand touches her red freckled cheek and feathers a silken stroke over her skin, brushing silvery strands away from rust-fissured features.

"Remain here," he says, with the flimsy, fluttering faith perfected by the loneliness of lifetimes.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** I realize that I have an inadvertent tendency to make Caius and Athenodora altogether too creepy as a pairing. I am trying to tone that down a little as this fic progresses while maintaining some of the utterly dysfunctional appeal that Volturi pairings inherently possess.

Let me know how I did, please :)


	4. Chapter 4

Athenodora is bloodless now, her pale hair pinned and twisted into compliance. Some semblance of propriety is requisite when meeting those whom she will call her coven.

"You are lovely," Caius says, cool and clipped as rain, because he knows of no other way to speak sincerely.

"I know." She emulates his tone peerlessly, eyes ablaze with scarlet glee. Absurdity delights her, and Caius contemplates the possibility of her slipping into the weave of his coven, finding endless diversion in that vivid tangle of character and madness.

"My brothers and their mates are overwhelming," he cautions.

"I am not surprised." She grins and he finds himself mirroring the gesture. Athenodora smiles far too easily, a clumsy stoic who succumbs to joy and swallows grief, but that is no fault, he decides, marvelling at the wintry grace upon her features.

They walk, side by side and dawdling like schoolchildren, amidst sunlight plaited through pillars.

"Aro sees thoughts. If he touches you, he will view every corner of your mind. When he offers to take your hand, you may agree or decline as you see fit," Caius instructs, a quiet, summarizing staccato. There is a snarl in his tone, rootless resentment made word.

"Didyme, the little one with dark hair, has the gift of granting happiness," he continues. "Marcus, her mate, sees the bonds between people."

"And you?" she questions.

"Giftless. As is Sulpicia, Aro's mate. That is the most common circumstance."

She appears calm, comforted that her mind remains her own in his company.

[-]

"Who is that?" Athenodora half-whispers. The words carry, echoing into the hollows and shadows of the chamber where four other immortals are gathered.

"My brother, Aro," Caius says. "Not by birth," he remedies, certain that shared kinship with the man in question will only further damn him in her eyes.

"Does he always smile in that way?" she asks, looking distinctly startled.

"He means to be welcoming. Forgive him."

Athenodora, it seems, can masquerade behind charm, concealing the edges and barbs of her temper with the poise of one who has been taught to do so for years. Her wary gaze becomes sunlight when Aro addresses her, and she answers each question with elusive, laughing ease. When his hand is extended, she rests her palm on his for a decorous length of time, leaving him with vignettes and vestiges of her mind, nothing more.

[-]

When they have departed the company of the coven, Athenodora's curiosity shows itself, sharp and seeking.

"Marcus and Didyme—how long have they been very much in love?" she asks. Their passion, plainly wrought, turns them from flesh to metaphor; there is no justification for such simple sentimentality in Athenodora's mind.

"Too long," he admits, biting back a grin.

"Is your kind always so desperately besotted?" she wonders, and the question is leading.

"Our kind," he corrects. "And I should hope not."

"Aro was disappointed. Is that because I am an unsatisfactory immortal, or because I am a distraction from whatever it is that you do?" she continues, each query silver and slipping, fish scales beneath the blue.

_Gods_, nothing can be hidden from her, Caius notes, bidding farewell to a muddled eternity of polite demi-truths and cream-coloured lies. "Most likely the latter," he concedes, unwilling to drag to the surface Aro's murky pleasure in immortal gifts.

"What is that your family does? Your brothers seem so—Roman in their sensibilities." She uses the term as an insult, her nose crinkling in amusement."As though they dream of power alone."

"In this part of the world, we enforce peace amongst creatures like us," he says, wondering if the sweeping explanation that Marcus has concocted will convince her.

"A noble pursuit," she muses, then adds, "I do not quite believe you."

He does not defend himself, for her eyes are ink once more as thirst steals her mind.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** I'll have you know that I'm neglecting Serious Schoolwork to write this story. Please leave me a review to make me feel better about my procrastinating ways ;)

A thank you to the people who favourited and reviewed, particularly the anonymous ones whom I can't thank in any other way.


	5. Chapter 5

Immortality's beginnings are jagged, colourful things, splintered bits of glass to be handled with cautious hands. Uncertainty does not suit Athenodora; she clings to silvered shadows and observes her companions with a mind half-muddied by thirst.

The brothers, by name and blood, reign in their corner of the world with hands of silk and iron. Marcus, she decides, is the gentlest of the trio, a diplomat with a scholar's soul who lives twined in little Didyme's desires. Nonetheless, his eyes are embers when conversation veers into the cool depths of plotted supremacy; even the kind have ambitions here.

Aro frightens her. He is the nameless centre of all, the point around which the stars wheel, and he enjoys the magnificence. His plans are penned in glorious words and pinned in place by lucent honour, but she can only half believe him. There is something seething and slippery about him and the sun-stained beauty he calls his wife; Athenodora is certain that her shoulders arc like a frightened cat's when she is in their company.

Caius, she notes, is the monster in the labyrinth's corners, whose repute and name are enough to command obedience. Cruelty is his strength and anger weaves itself around him like a lover. Beneath that—she cannot guess what lies there. He is only sternly courteous when at her side, and her scowl does not lighten.

[-]

Athenodora learns to hunt within squalid cities, permitting the damned to come to her. It takes little encouragement—a wide and wanting glance, a flicker of firefly fingers in the pewter moonlight—to draw some mortal into her arms. She presses far too close to those she kills, stealing a nail's edge of warmth, and prays that no-one will notice how terribly, tellingly forlorn the gesture is.

Caius, her constant shadow, is skilled at dealing death in darkness; he neither seduces nor asks. His murders are exquisite, clumsy enough to pass as the work of maddened human hands and rendered with the precision of a god.

[-]

On a night whipped by wind and thunder, Athenodora finally mimics Caius' motions perfectly, tearing a mortal's throat with lethal, steel-pared grace.

"Acceptable," her companion concedes, surveying the half-cool corpse in her arms. His hand is warm on her cheek, cautiously placed and light as snow. Some pretence guides the touch, garnet dotted upon her skin perhaps, but gentleness rimes the gesture like frost, and she does not flinch away.

"Why, then, do you still accompany me?" she asks, angled features turned cutting.

"To prevent you from destroying entire villages, for the most part. That sort of conduct is too noticeable for our tastes," he says, with a shade of a smile.

"You sound as though you have experience in that field." She finds it altogether too simple to imagine him delighting in rootless chaos for its own sake.

"Some day, I will tell you about my first handful of years." It is a casual offer, but a rare one. Velathri breeds silence, secrets wrapped in loops and left pressed into the heart's still chambers.

"Why not now?" she asks

"It will give you ideas."

Her brows arch, as though a challenge has been both issued and accepted. For a moment, their grin is shared, wary and rubbed raw around the edges, at the utter absurdity of their situation, a reluctant courtship painted in blood and laws carved deeper than bone.

It rains harder now, silver slipping upon pale hair and tracing rivulets on rust-smeared skin. The glittering hiss of water hitting stone shatters speech, and the trek home turns voiceless.

[-]

At dawn, when they stand in the shadows of a portico and wring rain from ashy cloaks, Caius flicks his fingers at Athenodora, grinning as water freckles her nose. She returns the gesture, and their twin smiles are playful for a heartbeat.

It occurs to her then that the monster at her side sheathes his talons for her. It is a flattering thought, but she is not particularly charmed.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** I apologize for the lack of updates this week. Because vampire fanfiction is not testable material at my place of study, I have to place it on the back-burner occasionally. An enormous amount of gratitude and fluffy, pink love(given the closeness of Valentine's Day) to everyone who read, favourited and reviewed the previous chapter.


	6. Chapter 6

Athenodora has discovered the library, a sun-splashed room where parchment and papyrus threaten to tumble from the trellises of shelves in a sea-storm of colour and dust. She spirals amidst the scrolls, occasionally selecting one and adding it to an ever-growing stack of desirable reading.

A world of words older than her imaginings consumes her attention entirely; she does not notice Sulpicia until the gold-edged woman is at her side.

"So," the older immortal croons "you are the new addition."

It is difficult not to feel unspeakably plain before Aro's mate; Athenodora is fairly certain that there is dust streaked upon her nose.

"You are very quiet," her viciously lovely companion continues, the word purposely inflectionless.

"What were you expecting?"

"Temper or weeping."

Perhaps Sulpicia does not lie to those whom she does not have pinned into place quite yet, Athenodora decides, and finds some comfort in the insight. "Would either change my position?" she wonders.

"No."

"What is my position here?" Her question is painted scarlet with desperation, but opportunities for answers have been few.

"That of a wife. Caius is persistent." There is a memory of a smile behind Sulpicia's tone, as though Caius' blind tenacity is a familial joke.

"Is it as inevitable as you make it seem?" Athenodora does not cherish the seeping implication that only time keeps her from being a monster's lover.

"You do not understand the nature of the bonds between mates," Sulpicia muses.

"I know nothing of the matter." The admission comes easily.

"You are being presented with perfect devotion. I would suggest using that to your advantage." Her smile gleams with power wielded from the shades and beading blood.

"There is nothing that I want from him," Athenodora hisses, affronted.

Aro's mate laughs, gloriously pretty once more. "No one is that selfless," she says, a scrap thrown over her shoulder as she departs.

[-]

Caius expects a quiet nightfall, punctuated only by impatient footfalls and breathy, blazing conversations that he would rather not hear.

Instead, Athenodora leans over his shoulder, a few errant wisps of hair brushing his collarbones. The imitation of touch is cool and clever, so distinctly like her that he cannot help questioning her intent. The blame should be placed upon newborn restlessness, the rising, roiling urge to rend asunder, he decides, and wonders no further.

"Why have you been relegated to papers and plots?" she asks.

"Mostly because Aro assumes that I have nothing else to occupy my nights," he says. "And because I am very, very good at military strategy." His expression refuses to remain marble etched into arrogance when she smiles.

"What are you doing, precisely?" she demands, delighting in the details.

"I am planning a war." There is no way to make that declaration gentle.

"On what grounds?"

"Aro wants the world, and the world does not return the sentiment." Once more, Caius considers the chance that she will flee at implications of brutality.

"Show me."

Apparently, he underestimates the bounds and ends of her curiosity.

"Very well. Sit."

She arches her brows. His desk is a seascape of parchment, precarious candles pooling into ivory puddles at the edges; the floor is worse. In a moment of impermissible recklessness, he sweeps pale hands over scarred wood, letting pages fly in blizzard that rustles like wings.

"You will regret that in a few hours," Athenodora notes, her amusement poorly hidden.

When she settles in front of him, bright-eyed and birdlike, he unfurls parchment upon her knees. "You hold the map and I will point," he says.

"Should I nod approvingly every once in a while?" Her irreverence is infectious; he catches himself smiling more than he should.

"I doubt I could stand the shock of you agreeing with me."

The night passes too quickly, utterly tangled in explanations of covens and snarled plans, colourless heads bowed over intricately scrawled spider-script. When the dawn streaks bloody fingers across an unwilling sky, Caius raises his gaze.

"Tomorrow night?"

The invitation is raw, soothed by a brush of butterfly-fingers and a smile's edge.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** This chapter was not grimly depressing. Something must be cheering me up...

Perhaps it's the fact that someone amongst you nominated '_A Thousand Stairs'_ for this cycle of The Vampies awards, dedicated to new or unknown authors. Thank you especially for nominating the fic in question in the ' evil always wins... because good is dumb' category. I like that sentiment :D

Please go and participate in the voting (link on my profile) between now and February 28th. Support the indie and underground fanfic writers.


	7. Chapter 7

Caius' ferocity is a honed blade, tested in amber flame and sweat-slicked battle. When he was mortal, a ragged, pale-eyed thing painted with scars, his own people fell silent near him and the rough-handed farmers at the Tiber's banks feared the shadow of the bone-white boy. He is accustomed to dread widening the eyes of those he addresses, ink drowning crimson irises, and he delights in it.

Athenodora, however, makes herself an exception.

When he returns from the throne room with crescent moons of ash beneath shorn nails, she examines his hands with a child's curiosity and curls around her scrolls and dreams once more. In time, she finds the parchments that record his victories, reading them with the dignity and detachment one would grant the Homeric epics.

"This does not disturb you?" he asks, curiosity rusted by trepidation, when she discovers the fate of a Roman coven, whom burly Felix has once called kin.

"Should it?" Her glance is appraising.

"I would not—I cannot harm you." Stumbling confessions come far too easily of late, Caius notes, with less unease than he has considered possible.

"Such kindness," Athenodora laughs.

"My apologies," he says, knowing that some things should not need to be said.

"If the lists and memories of those you murdered do not trouble me, do you think your propensity for incautious speech ever could?" she says, an echo of strange sweetness touching her voice with thin fingers.

[-]

"Listen to Didyme in my absence," Caius instructs, certain that Marcus' dizzily delicate mate will be the most suitable guardian for Athenodora when his brothers abandon Velathri for craftily acquisitive reasons.

"And Sulpicia?" The amusement glossing her falcon eyes suggests that she indulges in his favourite form of blasphemy: favouring Aro's mate above his sister. His grin, swift and blazing as autumn lightning, is an acknowledgement of a confederate in a lonely game.

"Only with generous skepticism," he says. "Do not hunt in daylight—for that matter, do not do anything obvious in daylight. Do not wander far from Velathri, if you can help it." The list of caveats grows long, and the conviction that Athenodora will obey only those she finds convenient prevents him from continuing. Leniency, it seems, is a gradual and soundless surrender.

"Why are you leaving me?" Her words sparkle, irreverently severed from the ponderous, prideful existence he reveres.

"Aro wishes to meet with a coven which hunts incautiously upon our territory." The lie comes quickly, side-stitched with authority and difficult to contradict.

Suddenly, too sharply, she darts and closes the distance between them, a tangle of colourless hair and silk the colour of the sky—

The kiss is innocent as tumbling snow for a moment, vestiges of tenderness trapped and fluttering between them, before Athenodora forgets to be human and catches fire. Then, Caius' shoulders carve striations in stone while slipping teeth mark his lip with shades of split skin. Nonetheless, he presses her too close, feeling the raw friction of bones, and devours her mouth in his turn. Damn the pain, his splintered mind insists, because she is here and warm and, for one mad moment, she _wants_ him—

Athenodora moves away first, her smile utterly unlike any expression he has seen upon her features, Persephone with pomegranate staining her lips the hue of a bruise. There is no gentleness, no shroud of sentiment in the metamorphosis, but then, he has expected nothing different.

"Please do not die," she says, neatly predicting the ash-rimed brutality of his departure while patient fingers untangle his hair, which she had wound into snarls moments before. Perhaps she wishes to erase traces of a newborn's flimsy, fickle longing, Caius notes, grimly pleased that the seaming scars she has etched will go nowhere.

"With that incentive, I will consider it," he agrees, though something feathery and fleeting dulls the customary curtness of his speech.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** The Vampies are still going on, with '_A Thousand Stairs'_ nominated in one of the categories. If you'd like to participate in the voting process, please see the link on my profile.

Thank you to those who read and reviewed the previous chapter :)


	8. Chapter 8

When it is half-occupied, the villa becomes a resting-place for ghosts and bones. Didyme frets, worrying at her nails with delicate teeth and twisting her hands until her knuckles spark and creak. Sulpicia eschews the obvious blemishes of loneliness, but she sings in the dark, wordless, smoke-filled melodies that could double as dirges and lullabies.

Athenodora, whose heart remains firmly her own, finds herself adhered to Didyme's side, a silent cipher for an absent mate and a distant brother. When the dark-haired girl weeps with no provocation, her pale companion sits beside her, a pensive, watchful shadow who does not wish to remain but has nowhere to flee.

[-]

Didyme's chambers are a temple to memory, preserved with such exquisite piety that Athenodora is troubled. If the past was a departed golden age, then the present must be cobbled from copper and lament; that thought is unwelcome.

"Sometimes, I cannot bear it," Didyme whimpers. Grief's merciless hands wring the words from an unwilling throat.

"I think I understand." Athenodora's sympathy is haphazard, and she knows it. In a half-year of immortality, she has not cried; that slender triumph is worn like an iron crown.

"We weren't always_ this_," Didyme admits.

Aro's gold-glossed guile is certain as sunrise, and the half-mad malice of Caius cannot be acquired with ease; the colourless woman guesses at revisionism within this tale's pages. "I cannot say what you are now," she admits, and waits for her companion to fill the fissures with telling speech.

"You will not believe me, but there was happiness here," she says, fiddling with the slender bands around her wrist, the tumbling gold reminiscent of laughter.

"There still is," Athenodora insists. She has seen joy, a tawny creature with an affinity for the shadows, in whispering, wondering caresses between mates and the taunting, playful affection of brothers.

"We do not—we're not intended to change," Aro's sister says, convincing soundless spectators, an empty chamber.

"Did you? You seem much the same as I would imagine you were in life." Sulpicia and Caius, Aro and Marcus are characters in a myth, all of them beauties and monsters and men who fancy themselves gods, but Didyme is only a human girl with garnet eyes to her silvery listener.

"That is my mistake."

Athenodora has no answers. Instead, she tangles her arms around Didyme and holds her close, petting her hair with the sort of tenderness formerly reserved for wound-winged sparrows. The night-haired woman is too small in her embrace, trembling and finespun as fishbones, with the build of a lovely thing, not a strong one.

She cannot think why this near-stranger confesses heartache to her, but hears and learns regardless.

[-]

Velathri turns sodden with borrowed sadness, and Athenodora cannot bear it. Each night, she strays farther beyond the city's gates, amid low hills and veined stone. The obsidian thirst of a newborn no longer carves her throat to ragged strips; she finds her peace in running until the ground bleeds into shadow-shapes.

On an evening when the moon is high and midsummer trickles slow as honey, she flees south, where silt turns to sand beneath her sandals, and the air is softness and salt. Hours pass, directionless, but she finds her way—

—she wants to call it _home_, a Grecian colony on the coast where her family has lived for four generations, but the word no longer suits. Though the streets are familiar as old scars and each step is painted blue with reminiscence, she knows that she will not return here again while the city yet stands.

Though she understands the foolishness of it, she clings to the shadows and finds herself wandering to the neat edges of the house where she had once lived. She knows, with wounding clarity that this is far too dangerous, that someone will see a girl assumed dead and speak of it.

That does not matter. Athenodora longs for traces of the past; her memory becomes mist with each passing day.

The smell of burned things, of decay and old flame, creeps into the periphery of her senses upon dainty feet then, and she notices that her home is lightless and soundless, free even of the susurrus of heart-beats. Perhaps an errant child tipped a brazier, she thinks before her mind goes white, the shade of ash and winter, Caius' colour.

If he had felt particularly kind, Athenodora reasons, he only over-turned candles. Otherwise—stone becomes dust beneath her palms as she imagines her family's end, spilled blood and splintered bone licked by fire and left to the crows.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **You've all written such lovely, encouraging reviews for the previous chapter, and I thank you. I'm a little behind in replies, but until I catch up, I just want to remind you of my appreciation.

I got an anonymous review, asking how old Athenodora is in this fic. She's eighteen. I know, I know, being that old and unmarried in the ancient world is some kind of travesty, but I swear the reason for it will be relevant to the plot. Now is perhaps a good time to direct you to my formspring account (link on profile), where you can ask me questions about my fics and have me answer them in a more timely fashion.


	9. Chapter 9

Caius has never been fond of happy homecomings. Marcus drowns Didyme with seeping, seeking kisses while Sulpicia and Aro have their own rituals, dependant on the tone of their farewells; he is left in the penumbrae of porticoes, surly and uncertain.

"You need to speak with your wife," Sulpicia says, escaping Aro's embrace with a darting giggle that is utterly unlike her.

"You are, I presume, using some alternative definition of that term." Caius' patience runs short with teasing, but a coarse cord of panic tautens in his chest nonetheless.

"Very well. The woman you wish was your wife," she appends, looping an arm through his. His cloak is rain-freckled and streaked with worse things but she does not seem to mind.

"What happened?" His mind is too adept at weaving nightmares of late.

"She will not explain. Athenodora returned from somewhere, locked herself in her rooms and broke everything that could be broken." Sulpicia pauses and offers a singeing smile, her lips chafed to currants by Aro's touch. "I could say something about matching tempers, but I will restrain myself. Am I not merciful?"

"I requested that you watch one newborn—" The words have ragged, snarling wings, before Caius catches himself. His brother's mate is a formidable, uncaring adversary and he does not want another war. "Why did she wander? Where did she go?" he demands, desperation drawing hands into claws.

Sulpicia's laugh is cut glass.

"Ask her. Prove your reputation for mindless courage."

[-]

"I went home and it seems that I no longer have one." Athenodora's voice glides, fingers dragged through water as soon as she sees the snow-haired man.

He attempts to speak, but she hushes him with a touch lighter than lark wings and edged with iron.

"You will listen first. What did you do to my family—_why?" _Anger sets her ablaze, the cold, blue-edged shade of corpse-lights. _"_Your desires were for me alone."

"There are laws to be obeyed." The defence is an arbitrary one, but then he has neither needed nor wished to justify himself before.

"What you did transcended the requirements of your beloved justice," she insists, shell-fine nails re-tracing the ghostly fissures she has carved into seamed stone. Her shoulders are drawn into bony wings, as though she wishes to flee from the shades of black-cloaked rule.

Caius sighs, raking roughened fingers through hair that still carries the sting of smoke. "Aro turned his youngest sister, and neither you nor I can call her happy," he begins, bringing unspoken things into the dusty half-light. "I killed half of my family. Marcus left his parents and siblings mortal and he regrets that choice still. Sulpicia never speaks of her kin." The confessions are ugly, tarnished things but he continues. "I wanted to ensure that you, if ever you sought your family, would not find them. That is easiest."

Athenodora meets his gaze with a raven's wariness, seeking truth in a blur of sand and pretty comfort. "Or perhaps you merely wanted me to be alone. I cannot leave you if there is nowhere for me to go," she says, the quiet rain of grief silvering her speech, turning her brittle.

"I will not apologize for that," he admits.

The stillness resumes its rightful place between them.

"Leave. Please," she whispers minutes later, and Caius does, only because he hates to see her beg.

[-]

Caius spends days pasting together some facade of peace for Athenodora's wrath cannot last, and her inevitable tears will splinter him to the marrow.

When he finds her once more, she is in her chambers, parchment strewn around her in ivory drifts. The discarded papers are dark with drawings, portraits of the same people repeated. She is skilled enough, he observes as he sits in her shadow, but details evade her as though her recollections are only words now.

Caius smoothes the parchment and gently, gracefully takes charcoal between wintry fingers. In sure strokes, he corrects lines and shadows, rendering the faces of Athenodora's brothers and father from memory, all pale eyes, fair hair, angles.

He offers her the sketches, atonement cautiously painted, and waits. Her hands curl in hesitant blossoms but she accepts them, holding flawed vellum so close that her tunic and fingertips burn and blacken.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** This update was a little later than I anticipated, and I apologize. A thank-you to everyone who reviewed and favourited the previous chapter.

On a vaguely related note, I've discovered just how much fun writing about Caius and Sulpicia is. There's a story in there somewhere, about the strangest pseudo-sibling combination in Volterra.


	10. Chapter 10

"May I come in?" Caius asks, the doorframe pressing patterns into his spine.

"Only if you answer a question of mine," Athenodora says, swiping stray elf-locks from her eyes. Her hands are dusty and darting, filmed with the remains of the carnage she caused weeks ago, but her smile is moonlight and some semblance of order is being restored.

"The lady is playing the role of the sphinx on the road," he notes before glancing at the armful of colourful fabric she carries, wrinkled and bleeding feathers. "Cushions notwithstanding."

Athenodora's curved fingers and equally crooked grin are the only invitation he needs.

"What was it that you wished to ask?" he wonders, choosing a corner that is not swept with scrolls and cobwebs, over-turned candles and scattered silk.

"Why did you do this to me? How did you choose me amongst the thousands of mortals you have seen before?" she asks, sitting. He sinks beside her, until their knees touch like those of children sharing secrets.

"I doubt that you will like my reasons," Caius says, a taunt slashed into his sickle smile.

"Try me." Athenodora cannot help rising to a spoken challenge, his or otherwise. It is a quiet, delicate hubris.

"You were a beautiful mortal—cold and pale and—," he stumbles, seeking the words to describe a girl of thorns and horns, painted in drowning colours. "From the first, I wanted you for prey, to toy with and kill before dawn."

She considers the insinuation of her mortality, an end hardly and clumsily escaped. "And, to think, I was expecting some grand revelation," she tells him, her own grin turned teasing. "Really, Caius, you barely evade the edges of dullness."

"Perhaps," he concedes. "Nonetheless, I watched you for a while. Coaxing virgins into the shadows is not as simple as you would imagine."

Athenodora's laugh is liquid. "I never contemplated the task, to tell the truth. Charm seems to be a talent of mine."

He wavers for a moment, warding away an unpleasantly sentimental confession: if the Fates had inversed his tale with hers, he would have gladly followed her into the black and died flush against her flesh, his throat raw from bloody kisses.

"I have interrupted," she murmurs. "My apologies. Please continue this fascinating recitation of the time you nearly ate me."

He bites away a smile.

"I cannot pretend my observation of you was thorough," he admits, a quick gesture to hair and skin the shade of shattered bone indicating that he looks too strange to slip unnoticed amongst humans. "But even I could see you were deceptively sharp beneath your silence and sweetness. Too watchful. A little too brutal when it came to achieving your ends and utterly convinced of your own cleverness." Caius will confess that Athenodora hid her nature well, but the blemishes blossomed in unguarded moments.v

"If you are to be believed, the darkness I possessed ran parallel to yours," she says, subdued. "And I was not quite so flawed."

"Of course not," he agrees, his tone touched with playful pride. "The potential, however, was there."

Athenodora's fingers knit around her knees, and pewter lashes form twin moons upon her cheekbones. "Because of a child's misdeeds, you decided that I would be a suitable immortal? A lover worthy of pursuit? That is hardly fair."

"Some—and they are few and scattered—simply should not be human. They chafe at the confines of mortality and favour the shadows, where the edges of things aren't so clear and the darkness seeps through." Once again, he fears revealing too much of himself, the wordless knowledge of fissures and faults that follows him, unflinching. "Because that description suits you, I had hoped that you would be a peerless immortal."

"Why the past tense?" she wonders, impish.

"One does not hope for something he has already been granted. Too similar to avarice for my tastes."

Athenodora has, apparently, already reduced him to sticky affection and the raw, newborn nature of the sentiment lends him recklessness. He slips forward and catches her chin between roughened fingers. _Soft_ is the first word that touches his mind, an odd, useless description that falls like feathers.

Any clinging vestiges of gentleness melt and become steam between them when their mouths collide. Athenodora tastes of the cold, leaving hoarfrost's burn on his tongue, and Caius' teeth mark her lips with shapes like tumbling ice. There is nothing lovely about the embrace, save for the stripped grace of symmetry.

"Let me be clear," she whispers, far too close. "I am not your wife—" her nails find his spine, "—your mate—" as pale palms brush the striations of his shoulders, "—or your lover." Certain that his attention is hers, Athenodora tears slim hands down his spine, rendering stung etchings that will not scar. "I am simply a girl foolish enough to want a monster."

Caius, his eyes like sacrificial obsidian, speaks only what lives in his mind.

"I would expect no less from you."

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** This chapter turned out longer than I expected. Who knew Caius and Athenodora could be so chatty? Also, I apologize for the lateness of this update; for the first time I can lay the blame squarely on Fanfiction . net and its technical difficulties, instead of my own laziness.

As always, thank you to those who read, reviewed and favourited the previous chapter :)


	11. Chapter 11

"You are early," Marcus grins when Caius walks into the granite-etched room where the councils of a triumvirate take place, sunrise staining sandstone rose. "To what do I owe this turn of events?"

"I live to surprise you, brother," the pale man says with a sharp-toothed smile. It is a humourless gesture but the dark-haired immortal is accustomed to flaring tempers and barbed words.

"And you succeeded," he admits, attention drawn elsewhere. The dawn's tawny glow catches the edges of a heavy torc around Caius' throat, the patterned gold doing a poor job of concealing wounds in the shape of a delicately eager mouth.

"I see you endeared yourself to the lovely Athenodora," Marcus laughs, not bothering to examine bonds. If his brother permits a lover to mark and maim him, there is little more his gift can uncover.

"As always, I have proven myself useful. Nothing more," Caius snarls, his voice rubbed raw. He does not look at Marcus for the remainder of the morning.

[-]

Athenodora slips into Caius' chambers in darkness, her feet damply bruised with grass and the hem of her tunic tucked too high for comfort. She is a creature of inversions, he notes, her feeding turning feral, not easing into elegance with time. Traces of rust on her wrists and chin serve as mementos of crimson-slashed madness; he wants to press his selfish mouth there, tasting only iron and _her. _

Wordless, she straddles him where he sits, warm knees digging bony crescents into his thighs as lips carrying the shade and scent of old blood catch him in a kiss. She feels fine as spider-silk in his arms, but he clasps her too tightly regardless, palms heavy on the fishbones of her spine, and allows himself to burn against her. Images of blistered flesh enter his mind far too easily as his tongue savours salt and silver, the strange sweetness of skin.

Caius cannot stop a proprietary snarl before it leaves his throat, but Athenodora's irises become inky stains and her spine curves into a cat's shivering arch. Perhaps, he dares hope, she does not mind being his for a finite and gasping moment.

"You are not happy," she murmurs, ending a bloody press of mouths and teeth with an observation that sounds both abrupt and Marcus-inspired.

There is something distinctly unfair about her lucidity, the way her words thrum clear and cool when he can barely calm his breathing, Caius thinks, roughened fingers claiming a steadying grip upon her arms. "I did not know that my happiness was a consideration." His voice carries an acrid aftertaste, reminiscent of scorched things best left unsaid.

Every time she ghosts to his side, barefoot and starving for touch, he feels chilly nails carve half-moons into his insides; this night is not unusual. Exquisite hurt intersects him, an acute awareness that she only longs for an alleviation of boredom, some diversion from a monotonous forever. Whatever he wants from her, it is not that.

"Your ability to avoid brooding is admirable," she grins, a teasing, padding kitten once more. "Besides, I like playing the role of the tortured lover, and you are beginning to ruin that for me." The statement's maudlin draping amuses her, striking sparks in her eyes and drawing her smile into something mischievous, maddening, molten.

One could fall in love with that gesture alone and he will gladly tell her half-truths if it will please her.

"Ignore what Marcus told you. I meddled when he courted Didyme, and good brother that he is, he feels obligated to return the favour," he says, a sickle smile appearing upon his features.

"Very well. Keep your secrets," she sighs, sweeping a snowy kiss across his forehead though laughter quirks her lips. He does not know how to identify tenderness's tracks, but Athenodora's voice has smoothened from thistles to honey in the still space between words.

Nothing is said about the clumsiness of his evasion, and Caius wonders whether she is trying to be kind. Minutes patter by in stillness, as she contentedly breathes delicate kisses upon his collarbones. Then, as though the passing silence wards her away, she uncurls herself from him and secures the pins in her hair, tidying waves and seafoam into coils.

"If you had any need of my heart, I would give it to you," she murmurs, an inscrutable staccato of speech tossed over her shoulder. "But you do not."

He plays with that handful of words, taking them apart and examining their facets, for the better part of the night.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** I apologize for the lateness of this update, and as always, thank you for the reviews of the previous chapter :)

This story's rating will rise to M in the next chapter or two, as a handful of you have requested. I'll post warnings when warranted.


	12. Chapter 12

_Obligatory warning: The rating of this story has been raised to an M. Although this chapter is quite tame in its presentation of sexuality, it is present nonetheless. Please take this into consideration before reading._

* * *

Caius has devoted too much thought to Athenodora's seduction.

The other women whom he has bedded have come to him with fright-tarnished irises and sticky thighs, half-drunk with drowning desire long before his fingers roughen the silk of their hair and mar their throats. They thirst for a lover with macabre proclivities, a monster that wears a pretty skin like a cloak and discards it at the first opportunity; he delights to oblige.

He is quite certain that Athenodora, a lovely, lonely aberration, will not be tempted by the darkness she already wields.

In desperation, he has taken to feeding upon pale waifs, slender nymphs with eyes like seawater, and therefore thoroughly unsatisfactory as a goddess's facsimiles.

[-]

"I want you." Athenodora announces it plainly, her brows stern and straight as crows' wings on a bleak horizon.

She has run through the rain, Caius notes, for her hair leaves watermarks on a tunic the shade of cream and parchment. He would much prefer some sign of discomfort, of tawny infatuation that steals speech, but he will settle for this newborn clumsiness if that is all she will offer him.

"Why?" he demands, irritated by games where she concocts the rules and he merely guesses at them.

"Because you feel too little, as I do. You are inadvertently funny. I find you beautiful," she pauses, examines her disjointed list and permits a shy smile to turn her lips tempting. "That should be enough."

"It is," he agrees, because that imitation of tenderness unstitches him at the seams. Suddenly, he longs for the buffer of blood, death and the tarnished lust born when the two coalesce—anything to justify the roiling, rising madness that will follow.

"I have never done this before," Athenodora says conversationally, needing no excuses. Her hands are busy loosening the pins of her gloriously Grecian garments and letting the fabric slip-slide over the high swells of her breasts, pubic bones that strain the skin, an absences of silvery curls, knees that do not touch.

"And, to think, I was expecting naive modesty," Caius says, because tossed barbs save his sanity from drowning in the shadowed dip at her collar.

"As was I—from you. Go on," she laughs, extending a hand and a tenuous invitation. His fingers tangle with hers, an earnest, inelegant tether, before he begins the half-hearted process of pulling off the dull weave of his tunic.

In a moment, Caius is bare, ragged and perfectly snowy before her. He is subject to the softest collision imaginable soon after, when Athenodora flies into his arms and devours him with plum-dark lips. No-one kisses quite like her, with the enthusiasm of discovering uncharted terrain and mastering it and a mouth that tastes of the cold.

"Not in the study," he murmurs, wrapping an arm around her waist and tugging her away. "Think of the destroyed paperwork."

It is a paltry ploy for intimacy, caresses exchanged in a chamber that is unarguably his, but the logic is likely circuitous, too jumbled for her to follow.

"Very well. We can destroy your bedroom in its place," she says, pressed impishly, imprudently close. Athenodora is far warmer than he is, fresh human blood filling the nets of her veins, and it proves exhilarating, a lethal imprint upon lavender-white skin.

[-]

Athenodora lies still, a statue save for her eyes against the pallor of the sheets. The pose's subtle submission unnerves Caius, accustomed to edged words and sharper touch. Tentatively, he allows fingertips to trail over the taut plain of her belly and she thaws at the touch, shoulders skimming fabric as she half-rises.

Seduction turns irrelevant then, relinquishing its place to want, which marks its hold in the crescent fissures she carves upon her lover's spine. Impatient fingers tug his hair downward, and he cannot help but comply.

Her breasts are exquisitely sensitive, Caius finds, each toying touch across bruise-blue areolas coaxing nonsense syllables, a lovely tangle of lilting Greek and harsher Latin, from her arched throat. When he closes eager teeth around the bud of her nipple, hard enough to sting, she reduces the cushion beneath her head to feathers and ribbons, then snarls at him when he pauses to examine the clouds of snowy down tumbling around him.

It is terribly consoling to be needed this much, Caius decides, but does not dwell on the sentiment. Instead, he chooses a soft-edged curl of a feather and ghosts it over Athenodora's belly, the gasping underside of her breasts, the sharp striations of her ribs.

"Nonono, not there," she insists, her breathing turning into ticklish giggles and splayed fingers shoving his shoulder.

"No? Somewhere else then." His voice is threaded with mischief, though his skin stings and pools with heat that drips like candlewax.

It is so simple to take the feather and trail it over the slit between her thighs, while her laughter inverts itself into moans. He allows himself to extend that particular brand of torture, his vision edged with scarlet, until a raggedly commanding prayer of _more_ leaves her equally torn lips, nipped and gnawed by her teeth and his.

His tongue replaces his fingers then, lapping at the salt-sweet slickness of her, while her legs loop around his shoulders and wrench him inexorably down. She chokes on the word _please,_ and he can hear her bemusement hiding behind longing, as though she wonders why her grace has fled.

For a moment, Caius considers drawing out her trembling, tautened arousal but the only thing lovelier than Athenodora begging is Athenodora utterly undone, knot-haired and wild-eyed, beneath his lips.

It takes only a handful of moments, side-stitched with teeth and a pulling mouth, to coax clenching, silent paroxysms from her, and he nearly follows her into temporary oblivion.

"Gods, you look insufferably smug," she purrs when she regains speech, curving at his side and fluttering a kiss over his shoulder; he cannot deny that observation.

The topography shifts quite suddenly as Athenodora pushes him down and perches on his chest, curious palms floating everywhere. Gradually, too slowly, she slips downward with a catlike smirk, watching the rising dark in Caius' eyes.

"Let me see what I can do," she murmurs against his stomach, her tongue punctuating kisses with damp, shimmering strokes. Before his mind turns to mirages and tricks of the light, Caius remembers, all too vividly, to fear the coming morning.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **I feel obligated to mention that the _Twilight Saga Illustrated Guide _ has rendered this fic thoroughly not canon-compliant. For those interested in a brief summary of how Caius and Athenodora got together in Stephenie Meyer's head, I will provide one: Both parties lived in Greece, got bitten by separate vampires and then met up when they were immortal. Following a brief period of arson/sex/whatever it is that vampires do in lieu of dating, they met Aro, who had already met Marcus. They were followed by Didyme and lastly Sulpicia. Somebody should write that story, because it features a twenty-something year old Aro, a teenage Marcus and a forty-something year old Caius, and those ages are just too darn _weird _for me to contemplate.

(Also, the back-story does imply a vaguely conflicted and uncertain Caius, which is a cool bit of characterization for me to pick apart. Never let it be said that I don't give Meyer credit when she writes something I find compelling.)

Lastly, if you've endured this monstrous author's note, please leave a review, if only to make me feel better about electing to write about vampires instead of studying the ethics of psychological research ;)


	13. Chapter 13

_Yet another obligatory warning: There is still some very mild sex in this chapter. As always, read at your own discretion. _

* * *

Afterwards_,_ Athenodora remains flat on her back, still as a dead starling, fingers like reaching wings on either side of her hair's winter aureole. The chamber smells of ruffled sheets and slicked flesh, the air itself turning feverish. Although the sullen dawn is unusually cold, she fancies heat, colourless and unforgiving as their melding skin, lingering between them.

She does not like loitering in the realm of sentiment, where unbidden warmth thaws the blinding, bitter crystal she has twined around her heart. This surrender is only weakness by another name, and she has no patience for that flaw within herself.

The silence turns leaden then, and she fears what words may escape her flayed lips if she does not shatter the stillness with cautious speech.

"Will I always be like this? A virgin, forever?" she asks, an ache woven from the weft of raw-nerved pleasure winding itself between her thighs. Being pain's recipient does not suit her, and practicalities take precedent over endearment.

"No. It—some damage..." Caius stumbles and she imagines that his face would be awash with pink had he been human.

"I understand." Awkwardly, a pale palm splays upon his cheek and pushes his head back onto the ridges of her ribs where it rests rather comfortably, all things considered. "You're funny," she drawls, and wonders where the hint of wine in her words has come from.

"I've been called worse," he concedes. An off-hand caress, brushed over the too-sensitive flesh at her throat, turns into a catalyst and a collision.

Their coupling is too swift now and half-raw with intensity, a contest for dominance without the good grace to disguise itself. Caius catches Athenodora's wrists above her head, leaving her body, lean lines of sinew and bone, perfectly exposed. His is a teasing exploration, teeth pressed against the fragile undersides of her breast and sharp touches littered over her hipbones. She indulges him for a while, all feathery sighs and innocence, until she tires of this game.

In a hurried tangle of limbs and discarded feathers sent flying, she straddles his hips and sets a carelessly fast rhythm. The pleasure turns to white-edged waves, each cresting too quickly, though Caius does not seem to mind, a smirk as impish as hers quirking a corner of his mouth.

"Let me help," he says, the offer lost amid a sigh and a snarl, his fingers finding the seam between her hips and losing themselves in exquisite friction.

She chokes upon fragments of his name soon after, and tumbles onto his chest, her lips pressed upon a field of scars as near-painful paroxysms relinquish their hold upon her.

_This_, Athenodora decides, is so far from perfect that it borders the edge of loveliness, but she would never voice such opulent whimsy. Instead, as Caius sweeps a kiss upon her collarbones, she squirms away.

"Shouldn't you be out of bed? Don't you have some laws to uphold?" she grins, shoving his shoulder.

"Don't you have some leading questions from Didyme to answer?" he counters, sitting up and finding her forehead with his mouth, a temporary farewell.

Any trace of severity remaining between them turns into laughter as the awkwardly affectionate process of untangling hair and finding discarded garments unfolds.

[-]

The floor of the baths is steam-slicked, scattered mosaics of gambolling dolphins coming alive beneath the play of water-refracted light. Athenodora delights in it, as only a girl born by the sea can, although the giddy glee does not last, interrupted by the patter of too-graceful footfalls.

"May I join you?" Sulpicia asks as she loosens honey-heavy curls from their coils, jewelled pins glittering like insects' wings before they are plucked away. It appears that the question is mere formality.

"Of course," Athenodora assents, edging towards the pool's center where she is best hidden beneath the blue.

"No need for modesty on my account," the tawny woman dismisses. "We have never been particularly private here." Her tunic is left folded upon a marble bench and delicately unabashed strides take her into the water.

"I forgot whom I was speaking to," her silvery companion agrees, her mind straying to Aro with his prying fingers and improper interest. The statement is shaded with insult, but she does not catch it in time.

"Are congratulations in order?" Sulpicia says, with a distinctly feline grin and barbs speckled between her words.

"Quite the opposite, I would think," Athenodora cups steaming water between her palms and permitting it to trickle down her front in winding rivulets. "I cannot consider departure now, can I?"

She wonders if the revelation sounds as ugly in the air as it does upon her tongue.

"Demetrios is the best tracker the world has yet seen," Aro's mate remarks, "My dear brother could find you in days if he chose."

"And I imagine he would choose to do just that," she sighs, dipping her head back until her hair mimics a drowned girl's ghostly ringlets.

"No need to imagine."

"How do you stand it here?" She thinks of a march of days spent behind shadowed stone, marked only by plots and ploys.

"Where else, my sweet little sister, do you think you could go?" Sulpicia purrs, examining the milky arches of her nails.

Athenodora glances at the lines of her limbs, pallid planes beneath dark water serving as a reminder that she is female, utterly undefended and aberrant with no father or husband to speak for her.

"I know what being Caius' wife will require of me," she says, bile blistering her speech.

"Ah, I see," Sulpicia murmurs, scrubbing a salve coarse with sea salt upon her shoulders. "You will claim to care whom he kills and under what pretenses."

"Not quite," she admits with a wry smile, pretty amorality painting her features. "The requisite loyalty is too steep a price for—_affection_." The bored mischief of the cleverly arrogant threads its way through her words. "I am not one for grand causes, Sulpicia."

"You are well-matched, then. The only idealists here are Marcus and Didyme. We have no need of more." There is something taunting in her tone, a reminder that she possesses the privilege to weigh, measure and dismiss as she chooses.

"You are a singularly discomforting woman," Athenodora offers with a laugh.

"Such flattery," Sulpicia scoffs. "If you must make a dramatic departure, please wait awhile. Caius would never forgive me if I were the one to scare away his charming new mate."

"I had forgotten how much familial harmony means to you," the taller woman says as she slips out of the water and tangles fabric around herself, coaxing a smile from her companion.

It is difficult to like Sulpicia and impossible to trust her, Athenodora decides, tearing a comb through the snarls of her hair, but she comes perilously close to both sentiments. It is becoming something of a habit, this fondness of monsters.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** It appears that I have lied to you when I said that the chapters wouldn't exceed 700 words in length. I hope that this partially excuses the slowness of my updates. After another week, my exams are over, and updates should resume their more regular schedule.

As always, an enormous thank-you to those who read, reviewed and favourited the previous chapter :) Kudos for not being scared away by the jump to an M-rating.


	14. Chapter 14

In the space of weeks, Athenodora studies Caius with the diligence of an astronomer seeking order in the stars. His brothers are conundrums made flesh, their butterfly-pretty wives freewheeling upon eccentric orbits of their own, but there is reason to him, a subtle symmetry to be uncovered.

His brand of tyranny, gleeful and steadfast, astounds her, the sentiment running chilly fingernails over her sides. In the periphery of a throne room where she does not quite belong, Athenodora watches her lover dispense punishment that barely bothers to disguise its yawning rictus behind justice's mask. Censure casts its vein-blue shadow over her thoughts for a moment, before she recalls that Caius has two brothers to hold him in check, should they so choose.

Gentle, monastic Marcus is neither, she realizes, flinching at her own misjudgment.

Idly and without whimsy, she wonders what she would do with the world if it were presented to her, as it has been to the man she half-loves. The conclusion is an honest, unflattering thing: she would be craftier, perhaps, and cleverer, a creature of silken brows and deft hands, but she cannot claim kindness.

It becomes simpler to forgive Caius then, to weave her fingers through his and pull him into her rooms though there is ash, feathery as snow, in his hair and the incense-sweetened stench of slaughter upon his skin. Cruelty thaws and runs in rivulets over his flesh and hers, as though her touch remakes him into something less monstrous.

It is a heady idea, Athenodora knows, and a fallacious one.

She sees shards of her own intentions in his devotion, the need to run and forget and become unmade. Perhaps, then, he is as ensnared in Velathri as she is.

[-]

When darkness streaks bruised fingers across the sky, Caius permits Athenodora to tug him outside, beyond Velathri's borders where the trees are sparse, slender things and the bones of the land peek through tawny ground. Between hunting and scarred, shivering sex, he finds himself inextricably looped around her, her delicate vertebrae prickling his chest and her lips teasing his arm as they shape the words of a cool inquiry.

"Why are you here, Cai?" Athenodora says. She has stumbled upon the name given to him at birth, promptly discarded when Rome rose from the Tiber's banks, but it does not sound quite as ugly when she speaks it, he decides.

The question startles him, its intent unfathomable.

"Because a very stubborn girl insisted upon dragging me outside," he offers, tracing her clavicle with curious fingers. "And now there are stones digging into my spine."

She laughs so easily now, and phantom warmth coils in the silent shallows of his chest.

"Not quite what I meant," she amends. "Why are you here, in this godsforsaken hilltop city, planning a war you cannot win with Aro?"

Immediately, Caius snarls, irritated. His loyalty is pristine, a heavy mark of pride and he cannot stand Athenodora's condemnation.

Some sentiment, too eagerly tender to name, halts his wrath long enough for civility to take the reins. He does not wish to contemplate how unpleasantly besotted that seems.

"Where else is there for me to go?" he says, the edges of his voice skinned and scabbing.

"That is a poor reason for remaining anywhere," she says. "And this is spoken by a master of staying for terrible reasons." Her fingers tangle in his hair and ruffle it affectionately, a gesture that is both unpardonable and charming. He finds himself calming beneath her palms, sour observations about the sirens'-lure of her approval flickering and dying like forgotten embers.

He hesitates, tugging the threads of his memories and finding a recounting whose truth cannot be questioned too much.

"I owe Aro and Marcus my allegiance and I am glad to give it to them," he says, the pronouncement stern as any Roman edict, and hopes that this will appease her. Perhaps, on a night of the sort described in poetry, she will show mercy and sheathe her claws.

"I sense a story," she grins, twisting to face him in a sinuous arch.

The vain hope of a less-inquisitive Athenodora turns to mist.

"When I was mortal, I was a soldier. Not the best—" he adds, remembering how sunlight playing on bronze shields scorched his pale eyes and tightened pain in bands around his skull, "—but skilled enough to be feared. The tribes spread word of a white-haired demon, merciless and mad. With time, the tales came to the attention of immortals."

The silence breathes, sated with secrets and memories of a man who lived for the delirium found only at the blade's edge, muscle shredded by pitted metal.

"My maker was from the coven that calls itself Dacian now. They were powerful even then, and they were collecting members. When I awoke from the metamorphosis, I was furious and defiant beyond reason, as newborns are. I killed my creator a few days after that."

"Now I can see why you were reluctant to share," she says, beading a kiss onto a thin thread of a scar. "Though I must admit that I haven't contemplated your death."

"Sweet of you."

"Continue," Athenodora urges, propping herself on an elbow and permitting her nails to dance over his ribs.

"The coven did not take kindly to such...insolence." His smirk is ivory, marked by too many teeth, as though he sees shades of himself in the rage of his former masters. "I destroyed or ran from every immortal sent after me. In little more than a year, I was no stronger than any of our kind, and I knew that I was damned."

"And then I found Aro and Marcus," Caius says. "They accepted me into their coven, although I was ungifted and pursued. Can you see how much of a kindness that was on their part?"

"Two other immortals? That was enough to stop the most powerful coven in our lands?" Athenodora wonders, falcon-eyed as ever.

"I tell you about my near-death, and you question the logistics?" he grins, trailing tickling fingers over her stomach until she giggles.

"Clearly you survived and my worry would be unwarranted," she says, soothing the statement's sting with fluttering fingers. "Now answer my question."

"Yes. Killing nomads is simple. Clans have alliances and vendettas."

Her smile strikes sparks in her eyes. "Besides the debt of gratitude, I assume that you remain here to plot your elaborate revenge."

He laughs, the gesture uncustomary. "Perhaps. Aro and I are of one mind in that regard."

"Are your boredom and blind faith in your brother a fair price to pay for vengeance?" she says, soft and certain.

"Spoken like a child." Her idealism is caustic upon his tongue.

"No. Spoken like someone who is a stranger here," she counters, ablaze. Her skin no longer rests against his, and distance hisses between them.

"How dare you presume to know anything about my sentiments? You are not as clever as you seem to think you are, my dear." His voice is cruel now, pitiless as the northern sea, because she is too observant, too near-sighted, too close to naming the doubts that gnaw at his ribs if given a chance.

"How dare you drag me into your miserable existence if you aren't certain about it yourself?" Athenodora says. She turns quiet when she is enraged, her words like struck crystal, too clear, too lucent to ignore.

"I am not miserable."

"You aren't happy," she challenges, shoulders taut and angled.

"Did you anticipate eternity to be _kind, _to me or anyone else?" Contempt tastes of old blood upon his teeth and tongue, but Caius does not regret resorting to it.

"I suppose not," she says, a feeble concession. "But I did not expect you to embrace centuries of tedium and impatience for the sake of a cause that will leave you dead, either."

She meets his gaze with the helpless eyes of a drowning girl, her fingers worrying at the silver tumble of her hair.

"I've trusted you," she murmurs, her voice a resting place for ghosts. "I've followed your laws and learned your ways because I thought that you knew better than I did. Can you fault me for being angry that you are just as lost as I am?"

Athenodora dresses with clever, pattering fingers and runs, dawn tracing shimmering trails upon the bones at her shoulders, leaving Caius behind her.

If pressed, he would call himself furious, a shadow-eyed creature wrenching at its tethers, but only because he fears the insinuating emptiness that will devour him when anger flees on ashen wings.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **The Romanian coven would probably be referred to as Dacian back in the day, if they were named based upon the region they lived in. Here ends your history lesson.

A loving thank-you to everyone who reviewed and favourited the previous chapter. Your encouragement, as always, is appreciated.


	15. Chapter 15

Athenodora does not run far before ribbons lace themselves through her ribs and tug, drawing her inexorably back, to Caius and the sightless blizzard of want he summons in her, to Velathri, hewn from granite and misplaced justice.

The stone beneath her toes turns bladelike, but her mind has long since wandered, trying to capture freedom's taste, some echo of a time when she would have fled without sparing a glance back like careless Orpheus.

It is a futile exercise; she can no longer recall feeling eighteen autumns old, and the rivulets of dried burgundy upon her hands have become constant companions. The oddity of finding purpose outside of herself in the shadows of titles and reputations tastes acrid upon her tongue, but that alters nothing.

She drifts then, waiflike and ghostly, for hours, choosing paths where the terrain rises and crests, the fever-dream of her thoughts only settling when immortal footfalls, purposely unsubtle, wrench her away.

"Athenodora," Marcus says in greeting, his tone courteous and his lips pristine, unsullied by the blood that turns his irises into gemstones. He smells of parchment and beeswax pooling into honey by a flame's blue warmth, a scent that remains familiar but cannot comfort. It is in Marcus' nature to soothe into complacency, like the slow sweep of wavelets upon sand, just as it is in hers to strike sparks; Athenodora feels the strain of mismatched tempers tauten the stillness between them.

"What a happy accident," she says with a fox-toothed smirk, and wonders when it was that Caius' manner seeped through her skin like seawater, leaving telltale salt-tracks. "Tell me, does everyone hunt by the uninhabited cliffs?"

"Can we not agree that this was purely a chance encounter, where I give you advice, you listen for a moment, and then I depart?" he says, smiling. The gesture remains diligently diplomatic and she must concede that he performs his task well, unwelcome though he is.

The rising sun already stains their irises copper and draws lovely refractions from exposed skin. This meeting, it seems, can only stretch for minutes before Marcus defies his own laws. Promised brevity alone holds her in place.

"What was it that you wished to say?"

It is a quick discussion, with no space left between the words. When it is over, Marcus offers Athenodora his pale palm and she takes it, following him to the rust-bathed rock of Velathri.

[-]

"You came back," Caius says, keeping his voice cool as mirror glass though his first instinct orders him to crush Athenodora against his chest, so tightly that her fishbone spine bites his palms.

"I did," Athenodora agrees, her gaze resting only upon the tawny dust filming her feet. "You have your brother to thank." She lingers in the corner of his room, wraithlike, and he is in no mood to rise from his desk and wind his arms around her.

"He was kind," he says, mostly sincere, as cold fingers dig deeply into old oak, a dire display of sentiment that refuses to be restrained. "You cannot do this," he hisses between clenched teeth. In an instant, he is certain, she will shatter and snarl and decry the justice that binds her here, arbitrary and enforced too eagerly. "The law be damned, you can't do this to me."

"I did not mean most of what I said," Athenodora whispers, her voice embroidered with scarlet silk, delicate and draping. The absent softness there startles him and he stands, matching her pattering, pacing footfalls.

"Yes, you did," he hisses, before he thaws and curls cool fingers upon her cheek, stealing sparks of blood-lent heat. He sees himself through her eyes for a heartbeat, pale and unyielding as temple marble, and comprehends her rebellion. If he were young as she, rubbed raw by warring passion, perhaps he would agree.

"You were not wrong," he concedes.

"Contrary to your assumptions, I do not aim to hurt you with everything I do," she sighs, her forehead pressing against his shoulder, as though she wishes to fade against his flesh. Elegant melancholy is unlike her; Caius permits his fingers to drip down her spine in comfort, trying to coax his playful, clever lover from the shades.

"I am not nearly arrogant enough to think that," he says, pulling her close and closer, until she settles tentative palms upon his chest, needle-fine nails burrowing into fabric as she seeks a handhold.

"Your brother offers compelling advice." The words are breathed upon his skin, melting patterns in the frost.

"He has his uses," Caius grins, thanking the nameless gods for romantic, ridiculous Marcus.

Athenodora raises her bloody gaze to meet his, and he drowns in it, half-choking on the flayed feeling he finds there. "Would you call me foolish if I believed him?"

"That depends on what he said to you." He cannot forget that Marcus' capacity for peacemaking is streaked with mischief, and that Athenodora would delight in it.

"That you will never leave Velathri," she says, wistful. "Because you are loyal, or vengeful, or mad."

"I sense some embellishment on your part," he grins, willing to claim any and all epithets if she is the one offering them. "Any other disparaging observations about my character?"

"A few, but I will detail them for you later." Her smile re-emerges, shy and silver as a winter dawn. "Marcus said that I had a chance of finding peace with you," she muses, speaking to no-one in particular. "Although I knew that."

"Perhaps peace is the wrong word."

This sudden capacity for honesty is frightening, Caius notes. If he were wiser, he would only agree, telling her pretty lies about a future that did not wrench and ruin.

"Amusement, then," she decides, her words turning whimsical.

Athenodora is cold, he knows, a creature painted in snowy shades and grey ice with a heart that hides itself too well. Descending into the realm of sentiment alone will trouble her, and yet he cannot stop himself.

"For what it is worth, I love you." The words tumble, plain and pitted as iron.

"I did not know," she says, startled, her brows sharp strokes once more.

He imagines that there should be agony carved in rusted slashes upon his ribs because she does not echo him, but the insistent press of her against him, darker and bolder than mere affection, eases the bite.

"Not something I hear from you often," he says, unable to resist teasing.

"Next time, perhaps you'd consider proving your affections in some other way," she says, laughter tangled in her voice. "Immortality is an extreme offering."

"I could try poetry."

"That is where your imagination stops?" she smiles, holding him impossibly close. Ink spills in her eyes, her lips turning into mischief itself before something grimmer taints her glee.

"I cannot promise to be a good mate," she says, the future melding into decades of weariness, a pitiless, granite landscape.

"Nor can I." It is not a difficult confession on his part.

"Can you not see how badly this may end?" Athenodora insists, wide-eyed.

"I knew it. Beneath the logic, you have a fondness for the dramatic." Exasperating her is steadily becoming a rather enjoyable diversion, Caius decides.

"You are avoiding the question." The eager crescents of her nails nip his collarbone just enough to sting.

"Very well. In the grand tradition of fools everywhere, we will throw ourselves against fate," he says, his fingers slipping over the blue branches of veins upon her throat.

Months from now, he is certain that Athenodora will tell him what she fears, naming the monsters that foresight has etched for her, but it is too early to press her.

"Which is the beginning of tragedies," she says, though she wavers too close to the edge of forgetting her convictions.

A breath later, she kisses him, her mouth tasting of arterial blood on snow and vicious grace. It is too gentle, too jagged at the edges for familiarity, but she remains close, bony and breathlessly perfect beneath his fingers. He does not let go.

"Will you remain in Velathri?" Caius says, an unspoken _with me_ clinging to the question like a shadow.

"Will you stop doing inordinately stupid things to convince me to stay?" she wonders, though the quirk of her mouth and the impatient weave of her fingers in his hair settles the question before he can.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **The next chapter or two will be fluffy. Consider yourselves warned.

An anonymous reviewer asked whether Athenodora is supposed to be beautiful, even for a vampire. To my mind, she's not so much beautiful as pretty in a creepy sort of way. I wish I could offer a better description, or a photograph, but I have yet to find one that matches the character as I envision her.

Finally, thank you to those who reviewed the previous chapter.


	16. Chapter 16

"Oh, I have missed you!" Didyme chirps, matching her pace with Athenodora's pattering, erratic steps. Her companion smells of sea salt and the baths, sodden streaks in her silver hair serving as a reminder that she has only just sloughed earth off of her skin.

"I have been absent a handful of days, my dear." Athenodora grins, slipping an arm around the smaller woman's waist. The immortal at her side is dainty, brittle as shells beneath the silken sweep of her tunic, and made trustworthy by sweetness.

"Ah, but we have a balance here and we need our littlest sister to maintain it," she says, tilting her head onto her friend's shoulder, a miasma of dizzy curls spilling onto flawless flesh.

"I thank you for your kindness," Athenodora says, with the stiffness of disused bone. "You and your mate."

"It is no bother," Didyme trills. "Though I do admit that I came to find you with another purpose."

The pale woman laughs, certain that Aro's dancing, ink-haired sister has only summer between her ribs.

"And what would that be?"

"You need clothes," Didyme says, giving Athenodora's tunic a withering glance. "Proper ones, now that you can be trusted not to destroy them."

"I like my clothes," she insists, crossing protective arms upon her stark, slate garment. "And Caius has no such qualms."

"Come. We must make you look like less of a wraith." Didyme's slim fingers loop in shimmering shackles around Athenodora's wrist.

She could disagree with Marcus' wife, she knows, but there is no argument against the dripping, honeyed happiness that fills her throat, alien and lovely.

[-]

Didyme's chamber is a dance of fabrics, the brilliant hues of flame, sky and storms tossed over chairs. The colours are impossible, impractical confections, but Athenodora finds herself enchanted nonetheless. The exquisite fall of silk and linen will shield her, turning her into a beauty and a figment, and that is better than being a barefoot, sparrow-hearted girl with bloody palms.

"Tell me, dear sister," Didyme says, after an hour of choosing and dismissing cloth, "why did you leave?"

She is unskilled at hiding her intent, Athenodora finds, and wonders why silver-tongued Aro and prudent Marcus have left no mark upon Didyme, though they claim to love her so dearly.

"Because this is not my home," she decides. It is a tactful turn of speech, one that will not encourage doubts. There will be a price, she is certain, for dissent, and she has no wish to pay it.

"And surely it did not become home overnight," the ink-haired creature muses. In that moment, Athenodora knows that Didyme wishes to learn something from her, intimate and evasive. For a heartbeat, a blistering sentiment, wildcat-mad, claws at her from within, indignant at the thought of being toyed with, but the passion passes.

The child in front of her is guiltless, she realizes and curses Aro for turning his sister too young, before her heart scarred and her mind steeled.

"Caius finds his purpose here, and I will not take that from him." It is a terribly wifely thing to say but Athenodora does not mind half as much as she should.

"You are dutiful, I see," Didyme says, warmth spilling between them once more.

"Perhaps. But the gesture did secure me the upper hand in any and all arguments we will have in the future, Caius and I," she grins. "And we are not prone to peace."

"My poor brother," she says, her eyes shimmering like the sun upon snow.

"I prefer to think of it as rather lyrical justice," Athenodora says, laughter lending lilt to her words. Her companion will not understand barbed devotion, perhaps, but she longs for it.

"I thank you for speaking with me to such honesty, sister," Didyme says, fractured light playing upon her lips.

"I didn't think I was helpful."

"More than you know." Didyme presses a quick kiss upon her friend's cheek and returns to unfurling fabric with graceful hands.

[-]

Athenodora has no intention of disturbing Caius, or confessing a craving for closeness. Instead, she ghosts into his chambers and finds herself an uncluttered corner and a pool of sunlight where she can read. In minutes, the snow-haired man shadows her, stretching at her side. Neatly-folded parchment remains in his hands. They put on a convincing display of inattention towards one another, until his cool fingertips glide through her neat braids, coaxing tangles from silvered silk.

"What are you doing, Cai?" she murmurs.

"Stealing all of your hairpins," he admits, grinning.

"Why?" She mirrors his smile, unable to remain stern when he is glad. It is a strange, faltering symmetry. Athenodora does not trust it quite yet.

"Because you look pretty with your hair undone," he says, playful and warm as early autumn against her skin, if only for a moment.

"Am I keeping you from something important?" she purrs, low and pleased, her face obscured by a wintry wave of tendrils.

"You underestimate how important you are." Caius turns docile when her mouth is flush against his throat. His palms, heavy as raw silk, trace shapes upon her ribs and belly, until Athenodora laughs, melting into rivulets upon his flesh.

Skepticism flutters over her features regardless. It is so easy to conjure sweetness from nothing when the corn-silk sunlight paints her skin with shimmering trails, and she places no weight upon lovers' words.

"That's the trouble with mates," he grins, catching her expression. "They become time-consuming. And distracting."

"Such praise." The lethargy lapping at her limbs, joined with the warm pressure of a broad hand on her hip, keep her from saying something sharper. Although she could easily spend the coming afternoon and evening lounging in Caius' arms, thoroughly entertained by the chase, catch and fall of coupling, she permits her mind to return to colder things.

Meeting his eyes, she frames her question in frost and insight.

"Tell me, why is Didyme unhappy?"

"I did not know that she was."

Caius resembles a wary wolf now, ears pricked and eyes wide, sensing a change in the wind, a warning of coming winter. Perhaps Didyme's sentiments are markers of something deeper, Athenodora notes, and remembers.

"She thinks about departure," she says, recalling the shivering, shadowy thrum of her delicate sister's voice. "Her intentions aren't as dramatic as mine."

"And perhaps more resolute. How certain are you?" he says, sharp as cracking ice though his fingers remain soft and skating.

"It is only a suspicion." She touches the striations between his brows and wonders, "Why are you so alarmed?"

"Marcus lives by Didyme's whims, for good and ill." It is not quite an answer, but it carries traces of truth.

"As a loving mate should, hm?"she teases, feathering a kiss over the bridge of his nose.

He sighs, too grim. "Athena, I would not grant your wish if it was as—" he pauses, and sweeps her up into an impossibly tight embrace, drowning the conversation with touch.

Just as she loses herself, his mouth reverent and rough upon the blue underside of her jaw, Caius raises his gaze.

"Will you promise me something?" he says, falling still.

"You ask for my word when I am in this state?" she laughs. "Not fair, my dear."

"Promise me," he insists. "Be careful with what you say, and to whom. Watch your sister."

She could pepper him with a dozen more questions, but for the first time, she hears a clever, feral creature speaking to her from beneath her lover's skin.

"And then I will tell you what I see," the monster in her marrow replies with a beautiful smirk.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** For once, I'm not updating this story in the middle of the night. It's progress, I hope :)

All of you have been leaving me lovely reviews, and I thank you. If, however, there is something about this story that you don't like, I encourage you to tell me about it. If you'd prefer to do it anonymously and receive a reply, I have a link to my Formspring account on my profile.


	17. Chapter 17

The walls carry tell-tale traces, incisions where Athenodora's spine cut into granite during too-frantic coupling. Perhaps she should be ashamed of abandon that leaves marks, but she cannot quite bring herself to do anything save for sinking to the ground and sitting half-sprawled beside an equally dishevelled Caius.

His fingers trace wary circles over the winged bones at her shoulders, impossibly light in their probing.

"Does it hurt?" he says when the pad of his thumb finds a carved striation.

She shakes her head, a gleaming fall of hair sweeping his collar. "Next time, you can be the one destroying the stonework." The giddiness of her smile is too apparent, she knows, and hides it against his clavicle, a crescent of a secret pressed onto his skin.

"That's your prerogative as a newborn. I have to feign propriety." His aim is sternness, but his smile betrays him, lupine and playful.

"Your sudden decorum frightens me."

"I prefer to blame you for the shameless destruction," he grins, peppering kisses upon the slope of her cheekbone. "I assumed that was the purpose of having a mate."

Before she can quirk her brows, his eyes darken.

"Aro wants to speak with us," Caius says, the words warm against the milky flesh where her throat meets her shoulder. It takes Athenodora a moment to catch threads of knotted unease in his voice, as though he has never before contemplated resenting his brother's encroachment upon his time.

"Aro wishes to speak with you," she corrects, curving away into a patch of shy sunlight. "I am staying right here."

The absence of his touch irks her and her gaze turns plaintive. Before her lips can curl into a pale pout, Caius shifts, his arm catching her around the hip and folding her closer.

"You think I am lying because I'm too besotted to leave your side?" he says, amused.

"I had forgotten your love of pure intentions." Her fragile fingers splay upon his hips and trail upward, her features impish. "If my presence is required, quite the disaster must have occurred."

"Or Aro is trying to be welcoming," Caius says, his words edged with a hissing pleasure.

"Your idealism is truly charming."

[-]

The sound of bone cracking is effortless, reminiscent of the dry snap of willow branches in summer, Athenodora thinks, watching the meticulous dismemberment of an immortal with little regard for the law. The torches cast into corners turn the scene before her into a shadow-ridden tableau, the brothers passing judgment reduced to mere darkness and severity.

The wrongdoer's head has already been severed and tossed into the low fire-pit at the chamber's tiled centre, but his body continues to writhe, half-sentient and utterly disconcerting. The scrabble of fingernails upon stone wrings her stomach and fills her mouth with the acrid after-bite of venom. Nonetheless, she permits harshness to spill upon her features, hardening her pretty gaze into a statue's stoic stare. It will not do to flinch and sob like a child, nor will it win her pity.

Beside her, Sulpicia examines the scene with discerning eyes, hunting for flaws in a pantomime of fairness witnessed countless times before. Didyme's sweet smile remains in place, but then it is not her mate tearing arms from blue-knotted shoulders.

Aro's motives in gathering his coven are shrouded. Athenodora picks through the possibilities, examining their facets and cutting her fingers on the ugly implications. Perhaps he reaches for a display of unity. A concordance of even a handful of immortals is an impressive thing, she assumes, if their kind is solitary and savage. That notion seems too simple, even in the mind of a girl who does not rule.

Her eyes dart, falcon-swift, to the pale array of faces around her. They are too proper to show sentiment, these civilized brothers and sisters of hers, but their approval hangs in the air, heavy as the promise of summer storms.

That is Aro's approach, she decides, surrendering to barbed clarity. They are permitted to be monsters, above any justice devised by men or gods, so long as they are _his_.

The flames are mad dancers, edged with fluttering colours as flesh is reduced to embers. The stench of sandalwood, cloying and clawed, fills the chamber then, and lingers longer than it should while charred motes spiral smoothly in the honeyed light of sunset.

Were she gentle or kind, Athenodora would contemplate the paradox of Caius' hands, feather light upon her skin and brutal otherwise, or Sulpicia's careless consideration. Instead, she wonders how long it will take to wash the hint of incense from her skin.

Her fair-haired sister holds her gaze and smiles, the gesture welcoming.

[-]

Practised grace demands that Caius bathe after sullying his hands with ash and bone. He descends into the lowest levels of the villa, where the springs from beneath the stone turn the air to liquid. Athenodora's scent haunts the narrow halls, and he smiles, finding shreds of warmth in the prospect of her presence.

This pool he seeks is small, steam rising from it in sullen swirls, and so deep that Athenodora is submerged entirely if she stands in the centre. She does just that, before springing to the surface in an eager mess of long limbs and bubbles. She comes alive in water, becoming a fish, a nymph, a creature not meant for cities of stone. Caius suspects that she will remain that way long after she has forgotten that she was born by the sea.

"You did well," he says, stripping away his tunic laced with smoke, and means it. Her expression is lost in the subdued splash as he slips beneath the dark water.

"I stood still and watched," she corrects. "You deserve the praise." Her brows are sharp lines, mirrors of her thoughts, and he knows that her mind has wandered to the realm of questions.

"I do not understand your justice," Athenodora says, standing on tentative tip-toe where the water is deepest.

"We aim for secrecy above all else," Caius says mildly, certain that her inquiries will cut more precisely if given the chance.

"That is not what troubles me." Her smile turns teasing then, made playful by the knowledge that he will not like her reasoning. "You promise those you rule an untroubled future in exchange for an uncompromising present."

"A fair sacrifice." He has watched Aro refine his tacticians' tricks over the years, turning speech into an elusive thing that drips through the fingers like blood. Mere words will not sway her, but he will not speak against his brothers openly either.

"To philosophers, perhaps," she agrees. "The rabble whom you seek to lead does not think so far ahead."

"We have loftier aims for them. Surely you can acknowledge the nobility in that." Caius cannot quite manage to hide his smirk, and neither can she.

"And if they embrace these ideals, they will no longer want tyrants for rulers."

His features are wolfish. "Very well. We praise the notion of righteousness and act as we please. Do you prefer that answer?"

"You are honest at last," Athenodora smiles, the gesture vanishing as quickly as fish scales beneath the blue. "I did not think myself cruel enough to witness death by fire without flinching."

"Putting compassion aside when necessary is not a flaw." Pride leaves crimson stains upon his words; Caius cannot imagine a mate without steel's pitiless bite in her thoughts.

"You would say that," she sighs, not without affection. "How often must I watch your brothers sentence misbehaving immortals?"

"Infrequently," he says, certain that he will not drag her onto the field of combat where slaughter is a common, copper thing. "I don't understand your reluctance, my dear. If you were forbidden from attending, you would be the first to listen through stone."

His smile is hopeful, his hand extended. She complies, a bundle of fine bones and fiery eyes in his arms.

"It's true." Laughter accompanies her confession, cool palms wandering over his flesh, until echoes, garbled by water, dance into the darkness.

Aro and Sulpicia's words carry a lingering bite, somewhere deep within a labyrinth of granite, and Caius turns to ice, listening.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **I apologize for the lateness of this instalment. I must have at least seven drafts of this accursed thing sitting on my computer, and I'm not entirely satisfied. That's the problem with filler-chapters, I'm afraid.

An enormous thank-you to those that reviewed the previous chapter. The increase in favs suggests that there are some new readers on board. Welcome.

Finally, a handful of my stories have been nominated for the Hopeless Romantics awards. My gratitude to the person/persons who did the nominating. Please take a look at the list of all the stories being considered; I've read quite a few of them and they are most excellent. Nominations are open until July 15th. Go forth and nominate someone awesome!


	18. Chapter 18

Caius toys with Aro's words and Sulpicia's worry, disliking what he has heard. News has spread through the south, a rush of dark wings, that the Dacians with to meet with Aro's _little coven,_ the term used with adequate scorn.

Perhaps they are merely curious. Power grants them that right.

Else, they hold suspicions of motives and means, an inkling of the game Aro plays.

The notion slicks Caius' throat with the iron taste of fear. His brother has no skill at subterfuge, and his sisters have never needed to acquire it. Placing faith in Marcus is reasonable, but that ploy may be insufficient. His youngest brother, didactic diplomat though he is, cannot rein Aro with words alone. A false step and—the statement is best left unfinished.

Only inside his chambers does he realize that he will have a handful of weeks with Athenodora and the marked absence of his siblings. That should change little, but he finds himself biting back a smile.

"Were you eavesdropping?" he asks her, although he knows the answer. She cannot keep boredom's bite at bay for long; if there is nothing to amuse her, she will invent diversion from the scraps of conversation that carry through stone.

"Blatantly, yes." Her smile is a flight of wonder, a play of light on wings.

"You could accompany me, you know," he says, settling beside her on the low window-seat she favours.

"I could," she agrees, "but I do not want to."

His disapproval is hummed into her hair, but he knows that the quirk of his mouth, a contented brand against the blue pallor of her throat, reveals his utter lack of condemnation.

"It's perfectly reasonable," Athenodora insists.

For a heartbeat, he wishes to see as she does, unfettered, unwilling to wander into Aro's battlefield of whispers and wiles. It frightens him, her dizzying desire to watch and know without acting.

"You have heard, then, that Aro and Marcus will be departing soon with our sisters," he says, keeping his voice unblemished by worry. The shadows are stirring around them, and he wonders if she knows how perilous their position is. A misstep, a mere stumble upon Aro's part when he is in the company of the Dacians, and all of their deaths will follow in graceful retribution.

Athenodora hides her sentiments well although her fingers, fine as lace, tighten upon his arm in silvery shackles.

"So much time," she murmurs, her voice silken, shimmering. "Whatever shall we do with it?"

She is beautiful when she wears the mask of one who is not afraid.

[-]

Athenodora prefers Caius when he has no-one to command. She could fancy herself a gentle soul who favours a kinder lover, but the truth of it is cutting, a bare and lovely blade. He belongs to her, wears her finger-marks pressed upon his heart, when he has no brothers to oppose and obey.

The days stretch, slow and sweet as tawny strands of honey pulled from a jar. Amidst the empty chambers and laughter, raw sparks of delight in defiance of the winter wind, she finds herself content. She has her mate, after all, who would wound and warp for her. It isn't precisely the definition of love, though it should be.

She cannot remember when her hair was neat last, unruffled by death-battered hands. That does not trouble her; nothing seems to. The pale sunlight has wormed its way beneath her skin, deep into the marrow below, burning and gleeful and maddening.

"I'm eighteen," she insists at night, her sharp little chin resting delicately upon the former home of his heartbeat, the awkward jut of ribs and scars. "I am allowed to be—"

_In love_ is not the correct term, too pretty for blood-eyed creatures that splinter stone if their minds wander, and _besotted _seems dismissive. She will not whip him with incautious cruelties anymore, she has decided. He has no need of fresh scars, painful constellations on a pale field.

"I know," he agrees. "What is my justification?"

She kisses his throat then, white hair clinging to her lashes like snow. The scent of flame engulfs her whole.

[-]

On occasion, Athenodora untangles herself from Caius' side and wanders to the library, the chamber beautiful and haphazard as ever. Its corners and crevices are familiar to her, but she seeks what she has not yet explored, the sort of texts that demand silence and solitude.

It is not difficult to find Aro's histories, heavy scrolls penned in seeping, staining ink that holds its venomous shade for centuries. He leaves his handiwork on slanting, solitary shelves, almost incautiously, and Athenodora wonders at his intentions. Surely there are better places to keep one's ruminations, but then, she holds no illusion about sharing space with Sulpicia.

Perhaps he only pens lies.

The notion is swiftly dismissed; Aro is no consummate weaver of elaborate falsehoods. Deception in the details is his domain. It is far more likely that he presumes his siblings have no interest in the workings of his mind, and wishes to dispel curiosity.

Her grin is mischief as she chooses a curl of cold parchment and thanks the gods for Aro's pretensions.

The beginnings of the coven are dull, she finds, described with the opulent sentimentality that only the young possess. Columns of rhapsodic prose are ignored as she searches for familiar names and discovers Didyme.

_The ink-haired girl is her brother's obsession. _

Such a suggestion is bitter and biting as bile in Athenodora's pristine thoughts, but she continues, seeking another conclusion with drowning desire. Around her, the words unfurl in ashy ribbons, binding her wrists and throat until she forgets to fight their pull.

Aro overlooks the truth that his sister is no great and tragic beauty, painting pictures of her loveliness with phrases sensuously frail as tumbling feathers. The wonderment of a newborn immortal, her eyes rounded by the promise of a blood-bright world to be tasted and shattered, is scrawled so accurately in letters losing their precision along the way that Athenodora finds herself half in love with the lyricism of it.

If she were wise, she would return the parchment to its place and leave, seeking Caius' touch in the lingering splashes of afternoon light, dyed crimson by the shadow of a storm.

Oh, but the story turns intriguing, for little Didyme finds herself coveted. Everyone, it seems, is in love with her, and Aro cannot quite say whether they lust for the insinuation of her flesh or the scraps of her spirit. His hurt oozes black and blurred as the ink, as he crucifies himself between a brother's duty and something Athendora cannot name.

Didyme's heart is coveted terrain for paragraphs, though her brother calls her a sweet child more often than not, and muses about her firefly-flimsy gift in the most disparaging of tones. Marcus escapes all mention. That is clever enough, Athenodora supposes, for scientific curiosity is a sterling excuse for this collection of memories. Envy transcribed into florid prose would be _unbecoming_, a word that tastes of Aro.

She thought, once, that she understood madness.

Too hastily, as though she knows that she will be caught, Athenodora gathers the parchment in her arms. Stumbling fingers roll it into shape and shove it into its cranny on the scarred shelf. Perhaps the spiders will mist it with silver before Aro's return, hiding her transgression for a little while.

[-]

Athenodora finds her Caius, fissured and stern, and twines herself around him, close as clinging ivy. His scent slips like raw silk over her skin, and she cannot help but thaw, icy edges blurring and softening.

"You look—"

"You can say _hideous_," Athenodora says lightly. Uncertainty makes her no lovelier.

"A more tactful variant of that, perhaps," Caius agrees.

"I'm thirsty," she decides, her defence simple. If he were to inquire further, she would have no answers to offer him.

"An original explanation."

She thanks him for not calling her a liar outright.

"Come on. Hunt with me?"

"Of course," he says, holding her too tightly for a moment. It is a childish gesture of comfort, but she drowns in it nonetheless.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **I found out that 'A Thousand Stairs' was one of three stories that won the 'Best Other Coven Romance Series' award in the _Hopeless Romantic Awards. _I'd like to thank you, my readers, for nominating and voting. I'm still in absolute awe that a fic about an obscure pairing in a huge fandom has found itself an audience, but I'm even more amazed at how awesome all of you are. I wish there was a better way of conveying my gratitude.

(I will add that the award graphic is a golden apple. I enjoy receiving golden apples. It makes me feel like a girl in a myth, with the added bonus that nobody is throwing the aforementioned golden apple at me as a means of winning my hand in marriage. Is this terribly nerdy? )

On another award-related note, my fic, "Of History and Wisdom" was nominated for an Emerging Swan Award, in the Short Story category, under the subheading of family/friendship. I'd like to thank the anonymous nominator, and if you feel so inclined, please go and read all of the nominated stories at emergingswanawards(dot)blogspot(dot)com.


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